Chapter 30 Aditya

Aditya

The Director's guest suite had a king-size bed, a framed photograph of the Director shaking hands with a Chief Minister, and a bathroom with a rain shower that hadn't worked since Monday, and Aditya Rathore slept in none of it.

He slept on the sofa, when he slept, with the satellite phone on his chest. The bed was for show. Everything in the guest suite was for show; it had been built for parents, for the ones who drove down from Delhi in big cars to see where their son would become a topper, and Aditya had always thought it was a little vulgar. But it had a desk, and a door that locked, and a window that looked down on the court, and the people downstairs needed to see the topper sleeping in the best room in the building. That was part of it. People needed to see the order. Order was something you could see, or it was nothing.

At eleven o'clock on Saturday night he sat at the desk with two notebooks open in front of him, side by side, and a green pen.

The first notebook was the Rank Register.

It was a proper register, hardbound, the kind the accounts department used for stores. He'd taken it from the office on Monday morning and ruled it himself, in pencil first and then in ink. Ninety-one names now. Rank, category, room, rations, duties. And at the back, on its own page, with a box drawn round it, the Betaal: twelve names, with their numbers beside them.

1. A. Rathore — L31 / G9.

2. K. Bhatia — L17 / G7.

3. S. Iyer — L14 / G8.

4. R. Sethi — L11 / G6.

And so on down. He liked the page. He liked the way it looked, the columns straight, the numbers lined up. You could see, just by looking at it, who could be trusted with what. That was all a list was, in the end: a promise that things could be known.

He went down it with the green pen, the way he did every Saturday, checking.

12. K. Anand — L3 / G1.

He stopped there.

He sat with the pen over the line for a while. He was thinking about five minutes. About a thin boy in a bloodstained shirt standing at the top of the steps in the floodlights, two metres from the wire, perfectly still, reading. Not panicking. Not showing off. Just reading, the way Aditya himself read a paper in the first five minutes, the way he'd been taught to by the best teachers in Kota: every question, every option, before you pick up your pen.

Nobody ranked twelfth reads like that.

I always read it fully before I fail it.

Aditya smiled a little, at the desk, alone. It had been a good line. He'd almost laughed.

He touched the pen to the page, beside Anand's name, where there was space for a note. Then he stopped. Kunal read the Register. Kunal read everything, and talked about most of it, and Aditya didn't want this talked about. Not yet. Not until he knew what it was.

So he left the line as it was. Instead, he turned his left hand over on the desk, palm up, and wrote on it in green ink, in small capitals, the way he'd been writing things on his hands since Wednesday.

WATCH.

He looked at it. Then he closed his hand, and opened the other notebook.

· · ·

The second notebook was small and black and had no title on it, and nobody had ever seen inside it, not even Kunal.

It was the notebook of things he was keeping.

He'd started it on Tuesday, the morning after his first wrong answer, when he'd gone looking in his own head for something ordinary and found that it wasn't there. It had been the name of his school bus driver in Jodhpur. A small thing. A man who'd driven him to school for six years and given him a toffee every Diwali. Aditya had known his name for twelve years, and on Tuesday morning he'd reached for it, and found a clean, empty space with the shape of a name around it.

So he'd started writing things down. Before they went.

Mother: Sunita.

Father: Rajendra. Bank manager, Jodhpur. Reads the paper aloud at breakfast.

Sister: Kavya. 14. Hates me (normal).

Dog: Bruno. Died 2019. Buried under the neem in the back.

Favourite food: Ma's dal baati. Ghee on top.

AIR 37, JEE Main. Papa cried in the kitchen. (I think.)

JEE Advanced: 2,416. Do not need to remember the rest of this.

He read the list every night, the way you'd check a list of supplies. It was getting longer. He kept thinking of things to add. Each time he thought of one he wrote it down at once, quickly, before he could lose it, and each time he wondered, very quietly, at the back of his mind, how many he hadn't thought of in time.

He came to the line he always stopped at.

Mother: Sunita. Her voice: —

He'd written that on Thursday. He'd been sitting in this chair, thinking of home, and tried to hear her, the way you can always hear your mother if you try, calling you for dinner, telling you to sit up straight. And he could remember that she called him. He could remember the words she used, the exact words. Adi, khana. He just couldn't remember what it sounded like when she said them. He'd sat there trying for an hour. It was like trying to remember a colour.

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So he'd written the dash. It was the most honest thing in the book.

He didn't let himself look at it for long. He'd found that if he looked at the dash for long, something in the order of things began to tilt, and he couldn't afford that. Ninety-one people were downstairs. He closed the notebook and put it in the drawer and locked the drawer.

· · ·

At half past eleven the satellite phone buzzed on the desk, and the display said what it always said: a long number, no name.

"Aditya, beta." The Director. Mr. Saxena had a voice like a very expensive car: smooth, warm, and somehow always arriving from a great distance. "How are my numbers?"

"Ninety-one, sir. One new arrival today. Five, actually. From the Tower."

"And our cohort?"

"Twelve now, sir. One new one. Low rank. Sabarmati."

"Twelve." The Director sounded pleased, the way he sounded on result day. "Excellent. Excellent. That's a very good retention figure, Aditya. You've done brilliantly. You know that."

Aditya felt it, the warmth of it, all the way down. He couldn't help it. He'd been feeling it his whole life, every time a teacher said his name like that.

"Keep them together," said Mr. Saxena. "That's the most important thing now. The programme students stay together, they stay calm, they stay on campus. The company team will come for them. It may take a little time. The roads are difficult. But they're coming."

"Yes, sir."

"And the Army?"

"Major Sangwan calls every night, sir. He says evacuation once the corridor's secure. He's asked for a list."

A small pause, at the great distance.

"Cooperate with the Major," said the Director. "Of course. Give him whatever he asks for. He's doing his job." Another pause. "But the programme students are our students, Aditya. Shikhar students. You understand? When the time comes, they leave with us. Not in some truck. We have a responsibility to them. And to their parents. They signed the consent forms."

"Yes, sir."

"Good boy," said the Director, and was gone.

· · ·

The Major called at a quarter past twelve, on the same phone, on a different number. He never said hello.

"Rathore. Status."

"Ninety-one, sir. Five new arrivals today. Twelve special cases."

He'd learned to call them that, on this line. Special cases. It was the Major's phrase. Aditya didn't know exactly what the Army knew about the Betaal, and he'd decided on the first night that it was better not to ask, and better not to tell more than he was asked.

"Twelve," said Major Sangwan. A voice like gravel in a bucket. Behind it, always, the sound of engines and radios and men shouting things a long way off. "Good. Keep them inside. Keep everyone inside. We're working on the corridor. Days, not weeks."

"Yes, sir."

"I'll need names. All of them. Full list. The special cases on a separate sheet."

"It's nearly ready, sir."

"Good lad." A pause. A sound, very far away, like a door slamming, which Aditya had learned was a gun. "You're doing good work, Rathore. Out."

Aditya put the phone down on the desk and sat looking at it.

Two men, he thought, on two numbers, both of them far away, both of them telling him he was doing good work. Both of them wanting the same twelve names. He didn't let himself think about why. It was enough that they both wanted to save them. It was enough that someone, somewhere, had a plan, and that his part of the plan was the list, and that the list was good.

Order is life, he thought. He'd started thinking that on Monday, when he'd stood in the lobby of the Admin Block with sixty terrified children and realised that every adult who should have told them what to do had either left in an SUV or was sitting in the mess with an empty plate in front of him. Somebody had to make a list. Somebody had to say you sleep here, you eat this, you do that. People needed it. They needed it more than food.

He'd given it to them. Everybody in this building was alive because he'd given it to them.

He believed that. He believed it the way he'd once believed he would be All India Rank 1.

· · ·

At one in the morning, he went out on patrol.

He always did it himself. Kunal had offered, and Sneha, but Aditya had found he needed it. He went out through the side door of the Admin Block, the one with the grille, and locked it behind him, and walked out into the dark among them.

They were everywhere, at night. Thousands of them, circling the Admin Block in the dark the way they did every night, slow and endless, round and round, wanting the light. He walked through them the way you walk through a crowd at a railway station, with his hands in his pockets, and they parted round him without looking at him, and closed again behind him.

He'd been afraid, the first night. He couldn't remember being afraid now. He wasn't sure whether that was courage or whether it was one of the things that had gone.

And as he walked, they came to him. Not the dead. The others.

He could feel them, behind him, in the building. The Ganga students who'd taken the blue capsules, the ones who'd never been bitten. Twenty or thirty of them, asleep on their mattresses in the big rooms on the second and third floors, and every one of them, even asleep, turned very slightly towards him as he walked, the way plants on a windowsill turn towards the light. He felt it in the Hum like warmth on the back of his neck. Every morning one of them brought him tea without being asked. Every evening they sat on the stairs outside his door, not saying anything, just near.

He knew what it was, roughly. He wasn't stupid. It was the capsule in them answering the capsule in him. It wasn't love. It wasn't even loyalty.

But it kept them calm, and calm kept them alive, and he'd decided on the second night that he wasn't going to think about it any harder than that.

· · ·

The trouble came at half past one, at the generators.

There were nine of them pressed against the fence of the generator pen behind the Admin Block, drawn by the noise and the heat and the faint light of the control panels, and the fence was bending. The electrician had warned him about that fence. If it went, they'd be among the DG sets, and the DG sets were the lights, and the lights were the order.

He turned their papers over. He saw them the way he always saw them: not as papers, the way the Sabarmati boy might, but as rows in a spreadsheet, nine rows, with their values in the cells, all the cells he could change and all the ones he couldn't.

Section B. What does it want. Noise. Light. He'd done it a hundred times. Move the want. Point them at the court instead, at the floodlights, the empty court, a hundred metres away. Two cells to change on each row, nine rows. He was tired. He'd been tired since Monday. He went down the rows fast, the way he went down every paper, because he was fast, because he'd always been the fastest person in every hall he'd ever sat in—

On the seventh row, he changed the wrong cell.

He knew it at once. It was like missing a step on a staircase in the dark.

−2.

And something went.

He felt it go. That was the worst part, every time: that you felt it go and didn't know what it was. Something lifted out of him, quietly, cleanly, like a book taken off a shelf in another room. He stood there in the dark among the dead with his hand on the generator fence and searched himself for it, frantically, the way you pat your pockets for your phone. Mother. Father. Kavya. Bruno. AIR 37. The hall, the paper, the rank. All there. All there.

He didn't know what was gone. He never knew.

The nine turned away from the fence and walked off towards the court, the way he'd told them to, all except the seventh, which stood still and confused for a few seconds and then followed the others. The fence straightened a little. The DG sets droned on behind it.

Order.

He went back inside and locked the grille behind him and climbed the stairs to the guest suite, and lay down on the sofa with the satellite phone on his chest, and slept like a stone.

· · ·

He woke at six to the sound of the dead going to class.

He lay on the sofa with his eyes open for a while, listening to their feet on the paths outside, thousands of feet, the sound of a whole campus going to its first lecture. Then he lifted his left hand to rub his eyes, and saw it.

On his palm, in green ink, in small capitals, in his own handwriting:

WATCH.

He looked at it for a long time.

He knew he'd written it. It was his hand, his ink, his capitals. He knew he'd written it last night, because he washed his hands every morning and it would have gone. He knew he'd written it for a reason, because he never wrote anything without a reason.

He just couldn't remember who it was about.